[nfbmi-talk] Quiet Cars

Wed May 16 13:46:52 UTC 2012

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Wurtzel" <f.wurtzel at att.net>
To: "'NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List'" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: "'George Wurtzel'" <gmwurtzel at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 11:02 PM
Subject: [nfbmi-talk] Quiet Cars


> The Silent Killer
>
> Hybrids are so quiet that pedestrians never hear them coming. Now 
> automakers
> are
>
> racing to make the car of the future sound like the gas guzzlers of old.
>
> By
>
> Paul Collins
>
> |
>
> Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2012, at 7:07 AM ET
>
> A Toyota Prius car.
>
> The quiet engine of hybrid and electric cars at low speeds poses a risk to
> pedestrians
>
> Jed Leicester/Getty Images.
>
> Forget gas mileage: The most striking aspect of the new Ford Focus 
> Electric
> is what
>
> itdoesn't
>
> have. "Battery-powered cars are intrinsically quiet, the motor sound 
> falling
> between
>
> a whir and a whisper," marvels
>
> aNew York Timesreview of the car
>
> . "But the Focus is deep-space silent, the quietest of the many electric
> cars I've
>
> driven."
>
> And that, it turns out, is a problem. Thanks to the
>
> Pedestrian Safety Act of 2010
>
> , by this summer the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration is
> required
>
> to initiate a rulemaking process for minimal vehicle noise-not how quiet,
> but how
>
> loud
>
> a car must be. That's because NHTSA studies in 2009 (
>
> pdf
>
> ) and 2011 (
>
> pdf
>
> ) confirmed what many long suspected: Hybrids and electric cars are too
> quiet for
>
> the blind or even the fully sighted to hear them coming. Though the NHTSA
> found little
>
> statistically significant difference in collisions over 35 mph-when wind 
> and
> tire
>
> noise negate the difference in engine noise-at lower speeds, hybrids and
> electric
>
> vehicles are 37 percent more likely to hit walkers and 66 percent more
> likely to
>
> collide with cyclists than traditional gas-powered cars.
>
> The victims didn't hear it coming-but did automakers? As counterintuitive 
> as
> adding
>
> car noise may seem, we've long had comparable safety laws in place: For
> instance,
>
> we add foul-smelling Butanethiol to natural gas so that it doesn't sneak 
> up
> on us
>
> in our homes. But there's an even more apt comparison: sleigh bells. Back 
> in
> the
>
> age of real horsepower, the jingling of bells had little to do with winter
> cheer,
>
> and plenty to do with not getting trampled to death. As early as 1797,
>
> Baltimore slapped one-dollar fines
>
> on anyone who didn't make their sleighs noisy enough. Other cities 
> followed
> suit,
>
> and even the future Motor City had
>
> a tough sleigh-bell ordinance
>
> that could land silent sleigh drivers in jail.
>
> Advertisement
>
> The problem that electric cars posed was apparent from the dawn of the 
> motor
> industry,
>
> when primitive gas and electric vehicles were already battling for 
> primacy.
> As early
>
> as 1900, journalist Cleveland Moffett was hailing the electric car as
>
> "the automobile of the future"
>
> -a status it has held ever since-in no small part due to it being "free 
> from
> noise."
>
> A
>
> contemporary electric car guidebook
>
> noted that construction had already advanced to the point where noise was
> "scarcely
>
> perceptible." But by 1908, an
>
> electric car guide warns
>
> "with the silent electric car, especial care is needed to avoid running 
> down
> incautious
>
> pedestrians." After the death of a pedestrian that same year, one EV 
> driver
> was moved
>
> to write to
>
> theCommercial Motor
>
> magazine with the question that has haunted the industry ever since:
>
> "Is Some Noise Desirable?"
>
> :
>
> I would like to raise the question as to the expediency of noiselessly
> running motor
>
> vehicles. Not that I wish to commend the present terrible clatter of some 
> of
> them;
>
> but, so much having been made of this quality of noiselessness by the
> electric-vehicle
>
> people in particular, I will so far as to assert that the worship of
> noiselessness
>
> will result in motor vehicles becoming too quiet.
>
> In the absence of much regulation, automakers responded with ... well,
> bells. Newspaper
>
> columnist Frederick Othman marveled at driving a
>
> Rauch-Lang Electric Brougham
>
> through St. Louis in 1916: "you went silently like a panther. ... [A pearl
> button]
>
> caused a tinkle, like a peculiarly melodious doorbell. The car was so 
> quiet
> that
>
> it was inclined to sneak up on pedestrians, and scare 'em. So there was a
> good deal
>
> of tinkling."
>
> Though electric cars were to disappear under a sea of petroleum for the 
> next
> 60 years,
>
> even a brief resurgence of interest in 1964 spurred the
>
> Long Beach Press-Telegram
>
> to note that pedestrians would soon need "agility and good peripheral
> vision." When
>
> the oil shocks of the 1970s hit, the renewed interest in EVs quickly
> revealed the
>
> problem again, with one 1979 Department of Energy report generating
>
> nationwide headlines of "Electric Cars Too Quiet?"
>
> Automakers were not exactly helpless to respond. The ill-fated
>
> Solargen Electric Motor Car Company
>
> was already selling electric-conversions of the AMC Concord which were
> "remarkably
>
> silent," as the
>
> Syracuse Post-Standard
>
> put it, "the only noticeable sound being an electrical 'whine' 
> intentionally
> engineered
>
> into the design to warn pedestrians during acceleration of up to 18 mph."
> The following
>
> year, the equally ill-fated Amectran Exar-1
>
> boasted
>
> "a noise generator that emits a harmonic tone at speeds under 30 mph." In
> Pennsylvania,
>
> when a Gettysburg-area power company used modified electric Dodge Omnis,
> Chevrolet
>
> Citations, and Volkswagen Rabbits,
>
> "a noise generator was added to alert pedestrians."
>
> Despite these efforts, and years of complaints by the National Federation 
> of
> the
>
> Blind-Honda was aware enough of the problem to file a
>
> 1994 patent for an EV noise-generator
>
> -automakers could not or would not hear the problem creeping up behind 
> them.
> The
>
> complaints became harder to ignore when, presaging the NHTSA collision
> findings the
>
> next year, studies in 2008
>
> from UC-Riverside
>
> and
>
> from Western Michigan University
>
> showed electric vehicles are hard to hear at low speeds.
>
> The response of the industry was clumsy. Many, including Honda and 
> high-end
> manufacturer
>
> Tesla Motors, doggedly continued to manufacture hybrid and electric cars
> that ignored
>
> the issue. One motive for Tesla becomes apparent when you read their 2011
> SEC filings:
>
> The safety feature
>
> "could negatively impact consumer interest in our vehicles."
>
> Nissan Leafs made a half-hearted effort by installing a grating
>
> boop-beep sound
>
> -but featured a mute button, something the new law wouldn't allow. Toyota
> and Hyundai
>
> have been more proactive: This
>
> 2010 Japanese video
>
> shows Toyota tinkering with the Jetsons-style sound that is now standard 
> on
> 2012
>
> Priuses.
>
> The most likely sound of the future, though, may be the sound of the past.
> Advocates
>
> for the blind have long asked for sounds that mimic other cars, and a 
> recent
> NHTSA
>
> study (
>
> pdf
>
> ) shows that simulated conventional engine noises can effectively warn
> pedestrians
>
> at lower overall volumes than conventional vehicles. Audi's
>
> new R8 eTron sound
>
> , for instance, emits a familiar growl. Whichever standard emerges, by 
> 2017
> new hybrids
>
> and electric cars will need federally mandated noisemakers installed-and, 
> in
> a little-reported
>
> catch in the law's language, by then the NHTSA may already be moving on
> extending
>
> the law to
>
> all
>
> cars that run too quietly, no matter what kind of engine they use.
>
> But that still leaves a fleet of over 1 million quiet cars already on the
> road. This
>
> includes the new "deep space quiet" Focus Electric:
>
> Ford says it won't install warning units
>
> on the ones now shipping out. "We just don't want to be too hasty," one
> executive
>
> informed the Autotrader website.
>
> Considering that they've now had about a century to solve this problem,
> perhaps they
>
> can avoid haste with a tried-and-true solution: Might we suggest the sound
> of sleigh
>
> bells?
>
> \
>
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